As November Ends

 

Photo by me, November 2024.

The early sunsets of late fall a week ago were spectacular ahead of rain and an upcoming colder weather pattern. The sky was impossible to ignore. It was fiery ribbons one day that twisted and streaked like the breathe of a dragon burning the earth in judgement.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Leaving Athens and heading toward home on Highway 316 was a drive into the ever morphing light.

Photo by me, November 2024.

You would have thought the world was coming to its end at the sun's farewell. The dragon breathe sky became an inverted Rothko painting.

The next day it was late, less than an hour before sunset, when I set out for a walk.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Around a lake I went and passed a foraging doe. To the east, the light reflected on a still lake as I crossed a bridge. By the time I had reached another side of the lake a few miles onward, the sun was long gone over the western horizon.

Photo by me, November 2024.

The last rays of sunshine beamed upward over the hills and across the water. It was a remarkable sight and I stood to look at it in the near darkness. The sun has set on this country, the decaying empire, after the morality play of the last election in which so many people sold their morals for whatever reason. No matter how dark it may become in the next few years as the light retreats, there will always be beauty to find and follow.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Photo by me, November 2024.

The rain came. Wednesday morning broke after a day and night of rainfall. In the half dark and half light of seven in the morning I looked at the water clinging to some of the roses in the rear of the house. They were more beautiful with the water droplets. The extra weight made the bushes bow as if recognizing the coming cold that was going to bring an end to the show of blossoms until next spring. Or I assume such, as one year I had roses blooming in January covered in snow.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Photo by me, November 2024.

In the subsequent cold that I had been waiting on for months, I planted tulip bulbs. I planted them in a couple of beds of existing tulips to fill in some of the spaces for next spring.

Photo by me, April 2024.

The tulips blooming last spring were a joy, but were too sparse for my liking. Next spring, no matter how the world may be, I want to at least have more joyful tulips. I should have twice as many next year.

Over four days I read Donna Tartt's 1992 novel, The Secret History. In 2013 I tried to read her novel, The Goldfinch, but I was not in the mood for it and put it down in the first chapter. The book felt like too much of a commitment at the time. With The Secret History I was absorbed and could not put it down with my feet on my desk and a throw wrapping my legs. It was her debut novel and at times that did show through in the writing as some passages were over-written and the ending drags on and on and on. The book needed a stronger editing hand for certain. By the epilogue, I did not much care what happened to the characters and skimmed some paragraphs. Getting to that point though, I did enjoy the novel. I will have to attempt The Goldfinch again.

I read somewhere that the character of the Classics professor in The Secret History, Julian, was possibly inspired by Claude Fredericks, who was a teacher at Bennington College. Claude unlike the character Julian was a gay man and was once the lover of poet James Merrill. Merrill died in 1995 of AIDS at age sixty-eight. For many years I have had a crush on the younger version of Merrill. He was a beautiful young man. I had not known that he was involved with Fredericks, but I was aware of his relationship with the much older Kimon Friar when he was a student at Amherst.

A young and captivating James Merrill.

James was an accomplished poet and Pulitzer Prize winner like Donna Tartt. Merrill was the son of the founding half of Merrill Lynch that shared his last name. Merrill for such a beauty, had odd taste in the looks of men that attracted him. Neither Fredericks or Friar were much to look at, but Merrill was very much in love with Friar as evidenced in his journals.

At the age of nineteen in 1945 when his romance with Friar is discovered by his mother, James Merrill writes to Friar, "There is one great lesson you can teach me, after teaching me to love. Teach me to suffer."

Despite not matching the physical description of the gay character Francis in The Secret History, I pictured Merrill in that role. Francis and Merrill were both from wealthy Northeastern families and I wanted that character to be attractive. Now that I am aware of his relationship with Claude Fredericks, it makes sense to me.  It makes even more sense for him to be that character when you consider that Kimon Friar was Greek and a teacher of Merrill's when they were involved.

Esquire Magazine 2019

While I am on the subject of Tartt and Bennington College, I have been listening to the podcast Once Upon A Time...at Bennington College. I am on episode five and was hoping for some insight into Tartt and her schooling at Bennington. So far it has been the Bret Easton Ellis show and people's obsession with him wearing Wayfarer shoes like it was a milestone in 80s fashion history. Tartt declined to be interviewed for the podcast and I am beginning to think that was a wise decision. Tartt, a fellow southerner born in Greenwood, Mississippi, has no social media, seldom does interviews and keeps a low profile away from the media circus. I cannot blame her.

The Summer of 2024

We should enjoy summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we will see.  - Andre Gide

 

The water shot from the nozzle of the hose on the August evening and I was a kid with a water cannon. The sunlight was blazing hot coming around the corner of the house between the sweetgum tree and the Japanese maple. I was sure it was going to make a weird sunburn shape on my bare leg that resembled Salvador Dali's melted pocket watches in his 1930s painting The Persistence of Memory. I jitterbugged to keep the mosquitos from dining on my ankles, but gave up when an evening stroller passed. The neighbors or strangers on my street can be a judgemental lot. Itchy red welts were as guaranteed as anything that Sears had sold under the Craftsman brand.

 

I watered hydrangeas, gardenias, nelly holly, zinnias, mums, daisies, roses, lilies, lavender, peonies, a camellia, pampas grass, begonias, some trees and  the lawn. If it needed water, and most everything did, then I doused it.

This was August being August when summer is supposed to be winding down, but sometimes flares up into a hot spell. These late summer heatwaves are as hollow as the wolf huffing and puffing outside the door. Summer can bully, but it always succumbs to autumn's triumph. The sunsets are sooner and the sunrises later as the sun has less time for its mischief. Hopefully by late October the frost will come to deliver the knock out punch.

The wayward downpours of July.

I loved and hated the summer of 2024. July was the worst and it always is. The sun was too strong and even the wind went on vacation that month. The rain spigot was shut off in June and remained so until the last two weeks of July. I watched the rain get lost time after time as it approached our side of the hill. It charged at us head on in a tease to only turn and climb another hill. The odds were not in our favor. Two weeks of storms in late July became no rain in August and the first half of September. The ground ached.

July 14th was the hottest day of the summer. The misery climaxed at 101 degrees.

The beginning and the ending of summer are the best parts with the rewards of new beginnings from the sprouts and the conclusions concentrated in the blooms. I cannot tell if I am writing about the life cycle of a season or of humans - they are so similar after all.

 

There were failures in the garden this year. What is a garden without some brown spotted leaves, bugs gnawing and the blooms that never were? The gladiolas grew, stalled and died. The poppies never sprouted. Two beds of wildflowers were eaten by wildlife. The hydrangeas bloomed early then lost their will to bloom again and instead wilted through the heat.

The hummingbirds have migrated as of last week, the wild rabbit that has lived here since spring has hopped onward, the deer are foraging more in the nearby woods and the hours of light are much shorter. Summer has ended and the drought lingers. It is time to plant bulbs for next spring, the clock of the garden never stops.

These were some of the successes grown here after the spring show of tulips and irises.

 

Summer goes with a wave, a turn on its heel and the understanding that it will reincarnate itself next year.

The Wind Down of Summer

 

Photo by me, August 2024.

Sometimes you have to stop when out for a walk and enjoy the view. That was what I did this past Sunday while on a six mile walk as the sweat soaked through my clothes and dripped from my hair. The sun was setting behind the clouds and hills and turning the landscape golden. It was late enough that no one else was around as the breeze cooled me off on an August evening.

It was a slow and gentle moment and there have been few of those this summer. I have spent too much time on the road going from here to there and back again. I love the road, but I love it less than I once did. Charles Kuralt in a Winnebago I am not. The hotel coffee, miles of traffic and the dependency on internet reviews of restaurants to find good food that often turn out to be anything but good wears me down after an extended period of it. I swear some people have questionable taste or low expectations when it comes to what is a decent meal. Years ago on a trip I learned to never eat Thai food in Amarillo and I was recently reminded again in another small city to stay away from Thai food in places where there is not a sizable Thai population.

Homeward bound. Photo by me July 2024.

The road is not done with me this year, I will be back on it soon enough.  I have considered writing a book that is set on the road as I entertain ideas for the next novel. The romance of the road is something I have seem to have lost between the rest areas and the mileposts. Or it could be that I do not enjoy summer travel all that much anymore.

A butterfly bush that I planted this year blooms. Photo by me, August 2024.

 

I am ready for summer to be over, my tan to fade, to put the shorts away for a few months and for the humidity to cease making the outdoors into a sauna. The flowers in my garden have been wonderful this year, but I am ready to do some work in them that requires cooler weather. Outdoor work around here never stops, there is always something to plant, trim, mulch or redesign. I am as an attentive gardener here as I was growing up at my childhood home in the country. I will miss the adorable hummingbirds that have been here all summer enjoying the lavender, zinnias, roses and other plants.

Terrible news out of New York as the legendary WCBS 880 is being flipped to sports talk. As if the world needs another place for mostly men to call in and bloviate about sports and worship overpaid sports stars. Of all my work in broadcasting I was never more proud of the work I did in the early 2000s on-air at WCBS 880. It was reaching the pinnacle in the industry to have been associated with that station. I thought the writing may have been on the wall for WCBS when recently there was significant breaking news and I tuned in. The station made no mention of the news for some time and in the past they would have been all over it and the anchoring sounded small market and not ready for the big leagues.

Photo by me, August 2024.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped in a "vintage" shop in Athens. It was the kind the of place where the merchandise was twice as old as the staff and the majority of the customers. I have been looking for a barn jacket from the nineties like I wore back then. I found several in this shop in okay, but not great, shape and at outrageous prices. They were charging three times the going price and this was a place where broke college students were the primary customers. Maybe college students are not broke these days or the ones who go to UGA aren't? If only I had kept the barn jacket I had as it would still fit today. I did think the above photo of the guy in a mask with a chain was curious and unexpected, but then again it was Athens so it was not all that weird.

Additional reading worth considering: How The Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way in The Atlantic.

Pylon - Danger

Spring Roses and Bob Edwards

 

It has been such a wonderful spring for the roses this year at home. The blooms have been abundant and with the rain last Sunday the weight almost broke some bushes.
 

This orange one growing at one end of the back yard has been spectacular.

 

The New Dawn that we grew at my childhood home and I grow now has its first bloom of the season. It should be covered in the coming weeks.

The tall Louisville, Kentucky boy, Bob Edwards, with President Jimmy Carter.

I did not learn until yesterday that former NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards died in February. Bob was the original host of Morning Edition since its inception in 1979. He was a hero of mine in radio with his wonderful voice and style. I was a regular listener to his show in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was also a Louisville native and there was that special connection since I lived and worked in radio there too. Bob is mentioned in my next novel, Shadow's Gravity.

I no longer listen to NPR, haven't for several years, as the hosts are insufferable and the programming is insulting. The Atlanta affiliate WABE has completely lost me too with its narrow viewpoint and activist journalism that I can't relate.

Louisville which has three public radio stations under the Louisville Public Media umbrella, including one that is still dedicated to classical music (rare these days), is a better option.

Although Bob Edwards had the rare longevity of hosting the same radio program for twenty-five years, it was a shame that he was pushed out in 2004 and what NPR became.